Class of 2009: this year's graduates have been hung out to dry

Yesterday, as I shook Greg Dyke's hand, I officially became a graduate – and a fully fledged member of Generation Crunch. Greg aside, it was a good moment. But it was also tinged with anxiety. Why? Because (as I wrote in the Daily Telegraph in February) due the recession and tuition fees, the class of 2009 is the most debt-ridden group of graduates in British history and the ones least likely to find a job.

The official statistics didn't interest me at the time. But as my robed friends and I posed for a group photo after the ceremony, the reality of the situation dawned on me. Out of twelve of us, only one has a full-time job lined up. Even she – a highly intelligent Hindi speaker – is headed for the Financial Times, presumably to report on her peers’ mass unemployment.

The rest of us were taken home by proud parents who will quickly come to realise that we aren’t moving out as soon as they imagined. It will be a confusing time for them: there’s no need for “helicopter parenting” when your offspring are manning the helipad. We are going to be sponging off them long-term, especially now our loans have dried up.

Of course we’ll be hunting for jobs, too. But as today’s Daily Telegraph reports, graduate unemployment has soared in the recession. One in ten of last year’s graduates was without a job six months after leaving university. I suspect, however, we will laugh bitterly at those figures when we get to 2010. In the past year job vacancies for graduates have been slashed by a quarter; anecdotally, I know that over half of my friends have no immediate prospect of a job.

So what’s the plan? Well, there has been talk of government-backed internships. But the Prime Minister has only promised 3,500 of them, so only around one per cent of us will be affected. The truth is – and we all know it – 99 per cent of us will have to ride the recession out. That’s why there has been such a big increase in applications for postgraduate courses, and an unexpected surge in interest in schemes like Teach First.

Gordon Brown has so far refused to face up to reality. Today, for example, he has announced that the Government will provide another 10,000 university places for students. It’s a short-sighted solution. Why bother shackling another swathe of Britain’s youth with debt, without any increase in the likelihood of a job at the end of it all? Let’s face it: in a recession, “education, education, education” means only one thing: debt, debt, debt. Making sure graduates get jobs must remain a priority. And until we are employed, the Government – not our overstretched parents – must realise that it has a responsibility to bail us out. After all, it was Labour who encouraged so many of us to go to university in the first place.